Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
I believe in the power of listening to connect us, challenge us, and change us. After several decades as a social researcher in the arts & culture field, I’ve reconnected with my own creative pasts (sound design, electronic music, theater) and begun developing immersive, shared experiences with sound as the primary medium. My practice is an inquiry into the social, emotional and ecological possibilities of high-fidelity, polyphonic audio — from intimate art installations to large-scale, participatory environments in civic spaces. One strand of my work aspires to place us bodily and together inside some of nature’s most complex and powerful phenomena, recalibrating our relationship to our animality and the natural world. Another strand uses spoken language and other kinds of human vocal production to build time-based, spatial audio encounters with justice and history. My big project is Riverghost, an independent nonprofit organization in which my collaborators and I are creating a series of installations replicating — at extraordinary levels of sonic depth and geospatial accuracy — specific, major rapids from the threatened rivers of the American west. For the full picture, see project link below or visit https://riverghost.org. What binds all my soundworks together is the uncanny tension between presence and absence: The physical reality of the sound touching our bodies only reminds us that the phenomena or people responsible for generating that sound are missing from the space — and we may soon lose them. I welcome collaborations of all kinds: artistic, cultural, technical, environmental. And of course we need grants, donations, and sponsorships for Riverghost as well as the justice-themed sound projects. Please email me at [email protected]. ***And yes, I’m still advising and supporting my dear research and evaluation colleagues at Slover Linett and the broader NORC.org. If you work in the cultural sector or arts policy and philanthropy, I’m happy to help you imagine, connect, and plan. Message me here, or my old emails still work ([email protected]).***
Along with brilliant collaborators and supported by wonderful board members, I'm developing a series of large-scale, socially immersive audio installations that connect us to the vital, threatened rivers of the North American west. Each Riverghost installation replicates a specific, named rapid, recorded in high resolution, many-channel sound using advanced techniques developed for this project. The recordings are then brought to life in either spatial or time-based shared experiences in museums, art spaces, and other civic and community sites. The project — now an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization — aims to honor the “voices” of these rivers and engage us bodily and ethically with their futures…which are our futures. (We are water, and rivers are also living beings.) We aspire to earn and build trust with some of the many Indigenous waterkeepers, activists, artists, and community leaders who have long been working with and for these rivers. We’re also hoping to partner with environmental, community, and creative organizations and projects so that Riverghost installations can amplify—literally and figuratively—other movements toward ecological healing, environmental justice, and social change. I’m excited and grateful to be exploring the abundant possibilities of sound as an artistic and social medium, particularly at the complex intersection of art, ecology, equity, and immersive experience. As a newcomer to all of those practices and professional communities, I’m eager to learn, share, and collaborate. And of course we’re looking for significant philanthropic or sponsorship resources to realize this ambitious series of installations. Message me here on LinkedIn or email [email protected].
The urgent work of helping arts and culture organizations understand their communities, co-create relevance, and foster equity continued when our cultural research practice became part of NORC, the widely respected research nonprofit affiliated with the University of Chicago, in 2023. My role shifted from co-leadership to advising, mentoring, visioning, and contributing to a few of our larger research initiatives. I helped our team integrate their work interests and career arcs into a new, much larger organization, and I worked with NORC’s leadership and research experts in other subject areas to explore how “arts &” thinking could open new possibilities. I watched our research team build on the legacy of Slover Linett’s past work and deepen their abilities, perspectives, and vision for a more just and equitable cultural sector — now with new tools, methods, and collaborative colleagues from across NORC. I provided institutional memory and strategic context as we worked in new ways with major foundations; advocacy and inclusion movements; museums of art, science, and history; performing arts and public media organizations; libraries and parks; and other kinds of cultural enterprises. And I supported Tanya Treptow, PhD as she stepped fully into her leadership role as director of the practice. In 2026, I’m still advising and supporting these cherished colleagues and NORC’s wonderful, vital cultural research practice. If you work in the cultural sector or arts policy and philanthropy, I’m happy to help you imagine, connect, and plan. Message me here, or email me at [email protected].
I co-founded and, for nearly 25 years, co-led this national practice in social research for the arts and culture sector. We helped (and my colleagues there now continue to help) changemakers, innovators, movement-builders, and communities working to make the arts, museums, and all kinds of cultural institutions more accessible, equitable, and vital to their populations, audiences, and supporters. We served museums of all types, performing arts organizations, public media stations, libraries, parks and public spaces, science communicators, and major foundations around the US, informing areas from experience design and community engagement to strategic planning and impact measurement. Our culturally responsive research and evaluation studies also helped guide arts philanthropy, policy, and practice on regional and national levels. In collaboration with several generations of other leaders at the firm, from whom I learned so much, I was proud to help our team expand beyond the arts-marketing research frame and embrace more equitable and co-creative methods and more justice-focused goals in our projects, and increase our work with smaller, community-engaged cultural organizations and equity-focused advocacy movements around the field. During the pandemic years and in support of the early-2020s resurgent racial justice movements, we were honored to collaborate with the Culture Track team at LaPlaca Cohen and with Yancey Consulting on several waves of a large-scale national study we called Culture + Community in a Time of Transformation: A Special Edition of Culture Track. We remain grateful to the Wallace Foundation and Barr Foundation for their support of that undertaking, and to the hundreds of arts and culture organizations and networks around the country that participated. In 2023, I helped envision and implement the merger of Slover Linett into NORC, a much larger and widely respected research nonprofit affiliated with the University of Chicago.
Review research, theory, and practice articles submitted to the journal and invite authors to contribute articles, think-pieces, and reviews. Help set strategic direction for the journal's editorial policy and international growth.
After editing Curator's book review column for six years, I became one of two associate editors. In that role, I helped editor Zahava Doering and the rest of the editorial team to keep the journal's content alive, sharp, and provocative. As most of you know, Curator: The Museum Journal is the leading peer-reviewed museum studies journal, offering scholarly articles, research reports, opinion pieces, and reviews of recent books, exhibitions, and museum media.
Curator: The Museum Journal is the leading peer-reviewed museum studies journal. Written by and for museum professionals and museum scholars, the journal offers articles, research reports, opinion pieces, and reviews of recent books, exhibitions, and museum media. For six years I edited the journal's book review section.
As a longtime collaborator and advisor of the Cultural Policy Center, I helped its executive and faculty leadership develop a variety of strategic initiatives, including a study of the building boom in performing arts centers and museums (Set in Stone) and a report on the opportunities and challenges facing university-based art museums. I was a visiting associate at the Cultural Policy Center during 2010, giving talks on subjectivity in cultural engagement and innovation in classical music and museums.